A movie trying hard to be a movie trying hard to be the movie it could have been, Napoleon, if Ridley Scott had kept to a few basic rules. 1. A minimum of respects for history (never mind Napoleon), but to declare that history is “what people tell you it is” is like telling you that cheese is what people tell you it tastes like. 2. (And this is as a matter of fact the greatest shortcoming): whether we like it or not, Napoleon’s life is an epic, “long poem, typically one derived from ancient oral tradition, narrating the deeds and adventures of heroic or legendary figures or the history of a nation.” (Dictionary). Which is to say that taking the epic out of the story, will be like serving O’Doul’s at a bachelor party. Between boredom and amusement, the viewer is treated with a few good cavalry charges and battles scenes, which could feature in any movie, and nobody would notice (change uniforms and scenery), a couple of nice pieces of music, and there you all about have it. Napoleon is a sully, brutal kind of guy, a Hulk, Rambo and Marlon Brandon-type kind of guy all rolled up into one, pathetically enamored with a skinny Josephine for reasons no one can fathom, except perhaps for his rabid lubricity, galloping to battle at the head of his troops like a real Sioux chief, and… I could go on… Things that I missed and would like to have seen: The sun of Austerlitz. There was no sun in the movie, at a battle the sun made so famous, for showing up on cue at the moment of victory! (That would have been a regal scene, but M. Scott didn’t want regal scenes). Perhaps also the crossing of the bridge at Arcole, where Napoleon grabbed a flag and ran ahead across a bridge under fire to encourage his troops to follow him, the crossing of the Alps, in the middle of winter, a little more of the Egyptian campaign, and not just a single scene of suspiciously well-dressed mameluks being bombarded; perhaps also of few scenes from the Italian or Spanish campaigns, and the battle of Eylau, and so forth, but never mind… There is no way to understand from watching this movie why Napoleon was Napoleon. I had a piece of paper on my knee and took a few notes. The movie starts badly. 1. Marie-Antoinette: They will show you, at the Châtelet in Paris, the room where Marie-Antoinette had her hair cut. I believe that the tools are there too, and an explanation as to why prisoners already had their hair cut before going to the guillotine (least the head would not be cut, though certainly the neck be broken, but an abundant mass of hair might prevent the blade to go clear through). 2. Her way to the guillotine. She was on a cart with her confessor and did go on foot as in the movie; and above all, there was no crowd throwing rotten vegetables and what-not at her, while she moved along with barely an escort. 3. French soldiery, here and throughout the movie, are flying large French flags, wherever they are going (perhaps to remind themselves they are in France, I don’t know… and that flag… Google would have told M. Scott that it did not exist at the time). I could name others… A last one: the scene of the frozen lakes after the battle of Austerlitz. Witness accounts have it that the fleeing enemy was barely affected by being bombarded by Napoleon, the cannon balls ricocheting on the ice, and Napoleon had the idea to have the cannon shooting straight up in the air, with the ball falling vertically to break the ice and drowning the enemy. The movie operates from a random choice of moments in the Napoleon’s saga (in addition, and perhaps expectedly to the Russian campaign, the Russian retreat, and Waterloo): Coronation, Elba, Saint-Hélène, and some others, but none of these is long enough to give a sentiment of what the real thing was. They compile, but do not add up, and neither help to understand what role Napoleon played in them… In some instance, one may even wonder what he was doing there… Caricatural, simplistic in characterization, M. Scott’s movie is a far cry from other accounts of the Napoleon saga (the legendary Napoleon of Abel Gance, for instance, which I had the privilege of viewing at radio City Hall in New York, with its three screens, allowing to project at once from one to three different scenes (and why don’t they make movies like this anymore?)). Yet (and that is here the real sad story) never mind Napoleon, or belittling Napoleon, but it is history itself that is being belittled by the film. You do not have to be a Napoleon fan (and I am not) to be made uncomfortable by a film that completely miscarries as far as delivering even a vague sense of the fervor, enthusiasm (listen to Beethoven’s 9th symphony!), fury and intense passions unleashed by the period, a true epic in its own right, that M. Scott has reduced to just a few cuts above a Western, soon to be forgotten.
As a write this, the morning after seeing the movie, my dominant feeling is now that Ridley Scott comes mostly through in the film as expressing what the English call a kind of “beef” against Napoleon, and perhaps even the French (several critics have mentioned the later)… 217 years later!… I would take for proof of this the listing M. Scott gives at the end of the film of the casualties of battles, in while characters on a black background, as if this was obviously only Napoleon’s doing, but forgetting that the whole 18th-century, and the 19th-century following it, were a time when two imperialist bullies, England and France, were fighting practically all over the planet for colonial empire… Perhaps that, seen under this angle, the movie can also help to remind us of how bitter that struggle was, that still can inspire bitterness two centuries later…